5 Genius Business Tactics Turning Broke Authors Into Millionaires

All right, we're live. Sean. I've got a little bit A few actually stories, but it starts with A person I hung out with out the other day. You know Ryan Halliday, right? The author Ryan Halliday. Of course. He came on the pod. He's awesome.

I was hanging out with him the other day and he said something actually to me in person, but he previously said this on the podcast that we had I think he's been on twice. He said something about how he actually made a funny comment. He's like most most authors Say they make more money. through speaking than they do actually selling their books. Those people

They just didn't sell a lot of books. However I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like a day song on the road, less travel, never looking at the black. Ryan has sold a ton of books. We know that for sure. But he also mentioned to me that his other things Like the Daily Stoic, which is his daily newsletter. So Ryan Halliday wrote a book on stoicism. He's written six or seven now at this point.

But he has this other property. It's a daily newsletter called The Daily Stoic, where they sell coins and merch and Advertisements. He has told me that that has made more money for him than selling books. Like, which is crazy'cause that's what he's known as as an author. And so what I wanted to talk to you about today.

was I went down this huge rabbit hole where I found ways that authors are making money other than just like writing a book. Well you you gotta you gotta tell the coin thing, because the coin thing is the perfect simple example of this. I don't know what he confirmed exactly, but explain the coin thing,'cause I think it's the perfect simple example of an author making money. Not off their book, but a a lot of money in some other way. Ryan Holiday's whole shtick is stoicism. It's a philosophy that is fairly useful and it's just like how to deal with hardship in your daily life. And

For some reason, he decided to come up with a coin. And it's a coin that in Latin it says like you're gonna die or like today's one of your last days alive or something like that. Like something like in And A coin's a great product to sell.

Because it costs twenty five bucks to sell. It costs like Up. dollar to make. It ships for whatever, a stamp, two stamps. So however much that is, 80 cents. There's no returns. There's no sizes. It's just like the easiest thing ever to sell. And on the podcast, I don't remember if he said the exact number, but I believe he said tens of thousands of coins, which is millions and millions of dollars. Is that what he said? He did he did say that and he also said that

He works with some mint. Some mint in the United States. And I guess it's It's one of the old famous coin mints, and he, I think he was like their biggest customer. Also like he's like they're minting more of his Memento Mori coin than they are anything else. So what I wanna do

And that was surprising to me. I had an inkling, and then he kind of revealed that that is true where he made more money not from selling books. But I had uh I went down this rabbit hole and what I wanna do is I wanna show you three people who are making significantly more money than you would think. And they are doing it in ways other than just writing one book. making whatever ten percent of the revenue that they of which they sell. All right. So we're gonna start with the first one. Sean, do you know who James Patterson is?

I do not know who James Patterson is. Who is James Patterson? I did not think you was like sandwiches. Maybe a former baseball player. Who are we talking about? You you are very smart. You're a very high IQ smart person. Oh God, here it comes. The fact that you don't know some of the most basic things like of pop culture, like it's it's beyond pop culture at this point. This is these are things that you see all over bookstores, whatever. It shocks me that you don't know this. Is he the vampire in Twilight? Yeah. Who is this? No. Okay. Your second guess was a lot further away from the first guess. So listen to this. So have you ever heard of the Stratmeyer syndicate? You probably haven't, right? Of course. If you haven't heard James

Patterson, you also probably haven't heard of Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. Have you heard of those things? They write mystery novels, right? For kids or something? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they are the main characters in murder mystery novels. So the way it starts is In the nineteen thirties, there was this thing called the Shrapmeyer syndicate. It was this one guy, he came up with this company in the thirties where he was like, Hey, not a lot of people are writing children's books. I'm gonna go ahead and start publishing children bo children's books. And then He was like, You know what? I need To write more books. But I don't feel like dealing with the hassle of working with these

artists, authors who like are just a pain in the butt to deal with. All I care about is making like kind of cookie cutter novels that children like. So what he did was he goes, I'm gonna actually just come up with these characters. So Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and he had a variety of other series. And I'm gonna have these authors write these books, but I'm just gonna say it's written by the same author every single time. I'm not gonna give it a a person l like their little bit of fame. I'm gonna pay them a fair rate. But it's and and

And they're gonna follow my rules. And maybe eventually they'll become a famous author, but for now they're just gonna follow my rules. And that's what he did. And there was that one point where like every kid in America could name Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, things like that. Stratmeyer syndicate. What a name. Uh

So wait, sorry, the syndicate is I I think I missed something here. The syndicate is the set of novels. The syndicate was the name of his company. He called it a syndicate, which sounds like a drug like a drug syndicate. It sounds like something illegal. Cause usually said that was just the name of his company. And it was a legitimate company. This wasn't like anything shady, although he did a bad job of naming it'd be like Naming like your kids.

children's book like Warm Candy and Vans or something like that. Like he did a very bad job of like naming his publishing company called the Syndicate. Kind of weird gotcha. But basically he came up with these rules where he was like all books need to be part of a series. Uh every chapter Needs to end. with a preview of what the next chapter is going to be.

The beginning of each book. needs to give a summary of only one page, what happened in the previous books. And he just had this like outline of how to like make hits. Well, fast forward uh seventy years, there's this guy named James Patterson. At this point now he's seventy five years old. He started uh an advertising in New York for the Jay Thompson advertising firm, just some huge firm.

But on the side, in his late twenties and early thirties, he starts writing novels. And they do okay. Like they're not like that big a hit. Um, but he keeps at it and he's a workaholic and he keeps going. And eventually at the age of forty seven, he retires from advertising and goes all in on publishing these novels. So he's been doing it now at this point for about twenty years, and he's finally starting to see success. And the whole point of his novels is they're thrillers.

Some people might say they're kinda like trash formalaic. Thrillers. But The thing is is People love'em.

And at this point, he sold something like five hundred million copies of his books. And at one point He uh Accounted for sixteen percent. Sorry, six percent of all hard cover novels sold in America.

So the guy's a hitmaker. He sold he sells a ton of'em. But here's the craziest part. Since he started writing uh about forty eight years ago. He's published on average Seven books a year.

And at this point, even though he's seventy five or seventy four. He's doing something like thirty books a year. Now How on earth Does a guy do that? That's like ridiculous, right? At this point, uh to be doing that. It's ridiculous to be doing that at a young age. It's more ridiculous to be doing it in the seventies well. It's ridiculous.

Well, here's how he does it. He has co authors and A little secret with James Patterson, even you know he's well loved in America. He actually has only written about twenty percent, like solely written twenty percent of the books that his name is is credited with as writing. The way that he does it, he has a team of s uh of co authors. And so what he does is he pays these guys out of his own pocket.

He kinda comes up with a framework. They flesh it out. He reviews it almost like a movie script and he's like writes uh notes in the in the in the margins and he gives it back to them and they kind of flesh it out. And at this point, he's done it so much that you'll see that there's James Patterson with Dolly Parton. I think there's a James Patterson and then the co author is Bill Clinton. And then the other co author who's like the person doing the actual work is listed below it. But this has been so success successful that at this point he's made something like eight hundred million dollars. What

Yes, that's how rich this guy is. He owns like three or four homes, each of them are worth forty million bucks. He's donated Something like fifty according to his website, to small bookstores. But this has been a smashing success. I'm shocked you've not heard of James Patterson. I think I have seen the name what's like his most famous book. I I don't even know the name of his books, but he's almost like uh do you know Tom Clancy? Yes.

Okay, he's like Tom Clancy. Does Cl Tom Clancy do the same thing or does he write all his own books? No, Tom Clancy uh would write them, but Jim Patterson does not write as much. But you know, like Jim Patterson at this point is sort of like Tom Clancy where you're like, Oh, it's a Tom Clancy novel. And I don't even know what Tom Clancy I can't even name his novels, but I know it's it means like it's like a spy novel. Right. Okay. So Um

Let me ask you a question. Did this guy start out writing all his books and then over the years was like, How do I scale? And he's like, What if I got another author? Or from the beginning was he like Did he have this plan from the beginning or did this come about organically trying to scale up? So Over the last twenty years that he's been killing it. I don't bel I don't think one of his books, I'm not sure exactly, but most of his books have not themselves been best sellers.

However. He has been a best selling author. If you add up all of his titles for many decades. And he learned early on, he was like well Like I don't know if any of individually are gonna be a hit.

But I'll just make a shit ton of them. And so he discovered early on to his on his career, he goes, We're gonna be about quantity. And at this point, he says that for the last forty years, he's worked something like uh seventy hours a week. And he writes all day. And when we talk about writing, it means working with a team and things like that. But he discovered early on, he's like, We're just gonna do quantity. We're gonna pump these babies out. And so at this point

Jim Patterson He's a face, he's a guy. He's a real person, but it's almost like a brand. And he's like gets these authors to kinda come under his brand and he makes jokes, but

They should pay these like these referring to his co-authors, they should pay me to be a co-author because I'm teaching them so much and they're getting their name out there. And he actually gives them press. So they're able to like list. But it's almost uh It's almost like the way the music industry works, of like have Nicki Min Nicki Minaj coming on your song. You have to pay Nicki Minaj, you know what I mean? I like that that's the first one you went to. Nicki Minaj. Um all right. So this is interesting. Uh what what do you like about this guy? You like that he basically

To me one thing I like is I feel like he broke the like precious rules. of like like writing and book like being an author is this like high prestige. Usually it's a high prestige, low volume. Labor of love. Uh, you know, that may you know, almost never makes money and if it happens to make money, you you kinda got lucky with this one smash hit.

And um You know the honor. is in slaving away at this novel for four years. And he's but sounds like he broke all those rules. He's not precious about it. He's like Cool. Let's write books people want to read. Let's g make it formulaic.

Uh, let's make it so that I can hire people that are gonna write these books. Um, let's scale this baby up. No individual we're we're hitting singles and doubles, baby. We're not going for home runs necessarily, because these will all add up. And it sounds like the cool thing is that this guy almost like Productized. This type of book and Exactly. More like a business person than he did a Artist.

Well, in reality what he is is he's an he was a he was the CEO of the Thomson Agency Group at No, it that's like a that's part of a huge corporation. And he's basically an advertising executive turned author. And he brings some of that. Pizazz to Being an author.

And it has worked really well. So he's both a business person and an advertising person. Let me give you two more that I think are even more interesting. Have you seen these books lately written by this guy named Jack Carr? It's kind of all the rage right now. I've I've heard the name, but I haven't Read anything, no. All right. So Jack Carr is a former Navy SEAL. He served in the Navy SEALs from nineteen ninety six, I think, to two thousand sixteen.

And he started writing these books called uh the first one was called The Terminal List. It came out in two thousand and eighteen. And if you if you go to the terminal list on Amazon, you'll see it's it's one of the highest reviewed books I've ever seen, given the quantity of reviews. It has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of reviews and it's like a four point five. I read One of them I think I even suggested that you read it. But It's really great. It's basically like

The equivalent of a romance novel for a woman, it's like James Bond for the man. It's like uh the basically the story of a guy who goes through all these hardships where he's a he's an ex Navy SEAL, his family gets hurt. He's got a

Save them. He's gotta get revenge. Whatever. All that like epic man shit. However. I started reading his book and I noticed something really interesting. He names products and brands like crazy in his books. And I'll give you an example. So this is a a uh a few excerpts or one excerpt from from one of the books where he talks about he reached inside and removed the nine millimeter Smith and Weston M thirty nine from his chest.

Better known in the SEAL teams as the MK twenty two hush puppy. And then he on goes on as saying he grabbed a box of his nine millimeter Supervell subsonic ammunition. That was sitting next to his Yeti cooler. He is I swear to God, they'll talk about things. Like for example, he'll talk about like sipped his athletic greens before He names brands like crazy.

Like there was one point where he was talking about like they're like he needed the best, most durable equipment. So we started using a Hill Person fanny pack or something like that. I'm like Dude can we care to like my he's like he did he put on his headphones and turned on My First Million, his go to on Tuesdays and Thursdays to all types of entrepreneurial inspiration. And then he went to war. He names stuff like crazy and the ki the main character his name's James Reese. He's like a James Bond type of guy where he does a lot of bad stuff, but like you really like him and you kinda want to be like him. And he just names all of the products that he uses and it's crazy. And so

I was interested, I'm like, why is this guy naming all these products? So I go to his website, I Google Jack Car Brands. I just Google that. He's got this whole website. I think it's just Jack Carr dot com. But if you Google Uh Jack.

Brands. Uh what you'll see is he has Jack Carr dot com and he creates do do you know like that website, um Uncrate. Or uh uh gear patrol. He basically has created his own version of that where he has all these gift guides, or he'll be like, here's all the gear that J uh James Reest used in this book.

And he has these beautiful guides on his website. And lo and behold, if you highlight over a lot of them. They're all affiliate lines. And in fact, And in fact, oftentimes on Jack Carr.com, he sells his own stuff. And so one of the main parts in this first book that I read is he's got this fancy tomahawk. Which is basically like an axe.

And he uses this tomahawk to kill people and it's like a really high quality tomahawk. Well Jackcar.com sells that exact same tomahawk. And I thought that this was brilliant. Because when reading these stories, he's talking about the cars that he's in, like the type of car that he's in. It's like a main part. I'm like, I want all this stuff because this character, James Reese, is so cool. All I have to do is go to Jack Carr dot com and I can buy all this stuff. And it's amazing.

I love this strategy. Yeah, this is brilliant. I've never I never would have thought that product placement in books would work like product placement in movies does, but that makes perfect sense. This is his uh this is his feestables. This is his prime, tomahawk. Dude, it's awesome. And by the way, I was just giving them a little shit. Not all of them are affiliate links, but a lot of them are. And if you go to like his Amazon page He even has this cool feature on his Amazon page where it lists all of the products in the books.

Nothing. You know, for example. A lot of people ask us a bunch of questions about like oh what do you use for this? Whatever. And it's like sometimes writing the shit down is Actually just it's valuable to them. It's useful to me. It saves me time. Uh, and I know that a bunch of podcasts do this, but it's it's like small income. It's side income, it's not their main thing. Do you think this guy's like

He's gotta be making more off of his books than he is off of this uh this Amazon affiliate thing, right? I think he's making more off. His books. But my third example is I'm gonna show someone who's making way more off this thing. And I think there's a world where Jack Carr will make way more off that side thing than the original thing. Meaning when you think of a Navy SEAL, you think of like

many things, including like the cool types of gear they have. And you like see what they're wearing, you're like, that's neat. I would love to have that thing. Or you know, you it's like cosplaying to be a tough guy. Right? I mean like cardigans. Yeah. Yeah. As he walked around his home wearing Birken socks. Yeah. Yeah. C Penny like sell like really good boxers or something I could talk about. Um Um The third one. Steve Renella. Have you heard of Steve Run Renella? Um three for three. No. Who is Steve Renella? Okay.

This one is I would I would not think you would know who this guy is. So he originally starts as a magazine article guy for outdoor magazine. So he basically he's from Michigan, went to school in Montana. He loves the outdoors. He also loves writing. And so he starts as a freelance journalist. He works for outdoor magazine. He works for like men's health these things where he he's able to like talk about the outdoors and they pay him a small amount of money, whatever. His First book that he writes. is about foraging. So which is basically just he wanted to create

The the the books sound silly, but they're actually awesome. He wanted to write about how he went and hunted and foraged his own Thanksgiving dinner. But like in doing that, you find like the meaning of life. And you see like the history of food, whatever, and outdoors, it's awesome. The second book that he did is called American Buffalo, and it's this amazing book about him hunting buffalo and how the buffalo are really important to American history, whatever. If you're not into that, you're not into it, which I don't think you are, but for the people who are What gave it away? Yeah This is like you know, my body language right now is the body language of a girl who's about to get grinded on by a guy at the club unwantedly. No no no thanks. Foraging for my food No thanks. I'm out of here. Would you like a free copy of my book? It's signed. No Yeah. You're you're not into this guy, but you're gonna be into what what I'm about to explain. So he writes his book, American Buffalo. It gets pretty popular. So then he creates this website called meeater dot com. Have you ever heard of meat eater? I have heard of meat eater, yes.

So Meet Eater starts as a series of podcasts. They have a show on this thing called the the outdoor or the sports channel, something like that. And it starts working out. Well Eventually Chernan, I think you know Chernan, they invest into it. And at this point in two thousand twenty three, Meet Eater is a website where Steve Ranella uh blogs about outdoors. He publishes books his books under the meat eater name. He has recipe books. He has uh more podcasts, whatever newsletters.

However They went and bought a bunch of brands. They bought a duck call business. They went and bought um A clothing line. Now in two thousand twenty three, they announced that they did a hundred million in revenue. from selling all of the products on meet eater dot com of which

His kind of claim to fame, or at least where he gets a lot of the traffic from, is his books and then his podcasts and things like that. And so this is an example of a guy who I think has made significantly more or will make significantly more in terms of enterprise value. From selling the product that he talks about in the books or selling the lifestyle.

This guy's super fascinating. Dude, going from American Buffalo A book about Buffaloes in America or whatever. Two

having a hundred million dollars in revenue on your business is like But it's It's something. It's someone's dream somewhere. It's a it's an American's dream. That is I can't believe that that happened. That's insane. Turnan is so smart, by the way. They took this one thesis.

Uh content to commerce. So they were like, hey Anybody who's world classic content. It's not valued properly in the market because media is such a shit business that they're valued as a media business, but if you can flip Their business model from content to commerce.

Then This thing is gonna this thing is gonna take off. It's gonna take off In the same way that our YouTube subs are gonna take off when you go to YouTube and you say to yourself, God damn, I'm learning a lot from Sam today about meat eaters and about authors and about all these people.

And they're gonna go to YouTube, you're gonna go to my first million, and you're gonna click subscribe because you love us so much. Thank you very much. That's the plug. That was a good one. Good job. I think um if I had to make a prediction. I think that meat eater will be worth many, many, many hundreds of millions, maybe even a billion dollars in the next Ten years.

I b I believe it. These these lifestyle brands, once you get like Uh there is no no niche too small with these lifestyle brands. Meteor is actually pretty big compared to some of these lifestyle brands, like the Hodinky, the watch brand, luxury watches only, right? Or there's things for like You know how people when they get into biking They become like, you know.

Lamer. They start dressing like SpongeBob. Spandex. And clip ons and then the like walk into a coffee shop after like a ninety thousand mile ride that morning. Like Those people are super valuable as an audience and they need content that's like so lame. Like that that it's the thing that they care about. And so there's like an endless niche of these like really, really hyper specific lifestyle content brands that I think can be built. Uh you just have to come from that space. It sounds like this guy, Steve Ranella.

You know, came from that space, which is pretty Pretty cool. You wanna know the uh here's a curveball to the situation. He lives in Brooklyn. Ha ha.

For real. He lives in Brooklyn Brooklyn. Brooklyn? Yeah, I well, he lives in Brooklyn. I was doing research on him and he's like from Montana and he's like I know Montana better than anywhere on anywhere uh anyone else in the country. I knew enough to get the hell out of there. Yeah. And now he lives in Brooklyn, which is uh what I thought was kind of weird. Um But anyway, those are my three examples. Of strange ways or shocking ways that a bunch of these authors are making money. I know that you are thinking about becoming an author. Does this change but

I think you've paused it. I'm not sure if you've paused it or if you've I think becoming an author, uh to make money is just Uh that's like saying You know, I was hungry, so I went to church. It's like, yeah, just'cause they have some food there doesn't mean that's why you go. And so like I don't think making money is the reason to s to write a book if you're gonna Well if you wanna make money and you're smart about marketing and all that, there's

A hundred times easier ways to make money. Did you just make up that analogy? That was a really good uh that was a really good analogy. I did my morning routine today, so you know, the brain is on. Um, the brain is awake. The thing that I've looked into is how much these authors make. So

There's like tiers to this. So uh If it was ten tiers, the first five tiers, you know, of tier ten through five. Is just All of them made no money. Actually, maybe tiers, you know, like uh ten all the way to number three, all made no money. But a couple of interesting data points uh that are in our world. So

I think the top tier is like the JK Rowlings of the world. Uh JK Rowling, James Patterson. Which is like You actually are mainstream canon, right? You are you're a part of the meta. Like you you you became The equivalent, you know, you're gonna get a Netflix show type of thing. So dude, have you ever thought about by the way, have you thought about JK Rowling and how she invented an entire universe and made up rules to like a game or a language that people refer to now, like the word muggle.

I actually thought that'd be thought of that word. At least twice a week. You know people do the Roman Empire thing? I don't give a shit about the Roman Empire. But dude, I do think of like Diagonale. I think about Hogwarts. I think about all these places, right? Like the I think about that twice a week. Uh how cool that is to say. Someone just made it up. It's weird in me. That's that's so odd. No bullshit. What percent of you Is like

Might be real. Is there any part of you that's like Well, I I I mean I am just a mogul. How would I know? The way that I think about it is It she is so good at inventing this thing that she couldn't possibly have invented it and she's just telling a true story. Like you know what I mean? Like it's just impossible to think that one brain, like our brains are each six pounds, but that came out of hers. I don't understand how that happens. Dude, I've been at an airport where it's like you have the smart cart thing. And I'm walking between, you know. Nine and ten.

And I don't run at it, but like, you know, I'll take my finger and sort of drag it against the wall just in case there's a little little give in that in that wall, you know, I'll I'll play I'll see. Um So there's that that tier, right? That's like God tier. Then there's the James Clear. You know, Atomic Habits, David Goggins, Mark Manson.

I think these guys have cleared like thirty to fifty million dollars off of a single book. That's a lot. I would say more like Twenty. So James Clear, I think uh I don't know how many he's sold now. It's his thing is escalating, by the way, which is really interesting. He tweeted this out recently and it was it was something like I'll try to find it, but it was basically like

He first year was like, you know. Maybe like a hundred thousand. And then the next year was like two hundred thousand. The third year was a million. And then the fourth year was like four million. And the fifth year was like fifteen million. And he's just gone up and up and up. I think now he's sold.

uh o basically I don't know, twenty million copies or something like that worldwide. And so you know. Really? That many? Twenty million? Yeah. Yeah. It's like a runaway train, basically. Um so I I think I'm pretty sure his his book has grossed like a hundred fifty to two hundred million dollars.

Probably hundred fi probably a hundred fifty million dollars. Well right, it's my guess. I you know, I might be off by thirty million in either direction, but but I'm not off by by half, you know? Um he's just a guy in Ohio. I think like

He's just a guy. Like I I knew him before the I I talked to him before the book and he was just like A blogger in Ohio, like it didn't seem particularly fancy and it doesn't matter, what I I knew him before he stopped talking to me. So so I think th that's like the next here. David Goggins' book, I think has done like thirty five, forty million dollars in sales and he did it. through scribes, so he kind of like

Owns more own a lot of Um Tim Farrell, surprisingly, didn't sell that many copies of Four Hour Work Week. I thought Four Hour Work Week was like a To me it was like that was A huge book. It's obviously did super, super well, but

I think it sold two million copies. Yeah, so two million versus twenty million, right? Ten X more for for atomic habits, which is pretty crazy. A fun one is Eric Jorgensen. So you know Eric Jorgensen, um He

He was like a startup growth guy. He lived in some I don't know where he lives. It was in like Kansas City or something like that. And Eric Jorgensen wrote the Navalmanac, which is basically he's like, Yo, Naval's tweets are the shit.

What if I printed him out. Basically, like, what if I printed it out and stapled it together, right? Obviously he did more than that, but the core idea was He didn't write The book. He didn't do a he didn't study Naval's life and write a biography. He didn't create a bunch of original wisdom. He just took Naval's existing wisdom that was super fragmented. packaged it up into a really easy to use book and then

And he actually gives away like the ebook for free, I think, online. Um I'm pretty sure Eric, he's never told me this is this is my my guesswork based on some some back of the envelope stuff. Pretty sure Eric has made like three to five million dollars off of the Devalman Act himself. No way. I don't believe that. That is so much money.

Really eighty two percent confident that that's a a real number. Dude, if you're even half right, I would be He's definitely made more than a million dollars. I think it's like three to five million dollars off the Navalman Act. Okay, well that's insane. Does Naval get anything? They've all got distribution. I don't think he gives them all any money from it.

I don't know. I'm gonna make you famous, baby. You're gonna be a superstar. That's what I'm gonna tell you. I'm gonna create the Shauna Shauna Mac. Dude, you said that way too naturally. That was not the first time you said that. Is that what you told Trunk? That's insane. I uh that that basically the concept is ridiculous. I mean it's good. The concept is genius is what it is. He took somebody else's genius that was fragmented and was like Why would I write my nobody wants to read the Eric Jorgensen book. But a lot of people want to write the Naval book, and Naval is kind of open source with it. He has he's said this many times. He's like the the best thing you could do. is let other people reshare your ideas.

They're, you know, stealing your ideas, but really they're propagating your ideas. It's one of the highest compliments, one of the best strategies you can have to get more distribution. And so Yeah, I think he was happy that You know, and it took him like a year. He put a lot of effort into it. Not nearly as much effort as the guy who actually came up with the content. Uh made five hundred million in his life. So I think he's done fine too, right? That's that's the whole idea. No, and Eric, by the way, I think Eric's now the CEO of Scribe, David Dick. The company that I did David Gogan's book. So and the company that I think you might u be using.

Uh Yeah, not yet. But um okay, so Another Crazy story. So I've never heard of this book and I doubt you have either. Are you a sci fi reader? Not exactly. Only like the most famous ones.

So have you ever heard of this book called Wool? No. Uh talking to me about science fiction is like talking to you about bison. Ain't going very far. That's a hard yes and basically here's the here's the idea. I was looking at the uh At the charts and I saw

All of the Game of Thrones books. So it's like, you know, a song of ice and fire. And it's basically George R. Martin, George R Martin, George R Martin. There's five of his books, and there was one book on top of it. Called wool. I was like, I've never heard of this book. What is this book? So I went and researched it. So the author, this guy. Hugh Howie, which sounds like a fake name, might be. I don't know. Um

His the his origin story is he's living in North Carolina He's broke. Uh, he was doing some odd jobs. He was like, Oh, there's a roofing gig. Yeah, I'll go help you out. You know, I'm a technician, sure, I'll I'll help you out. And basically at some point he's unemployed. He's like, you know what? I'm gonna write a book. His wife was kind of supporting the household. He's like, I'm gonna write a book. And she's like, Okay, honey, great. Uh sure you don't wanna get out there with the old resume. And she's like, No, I'm gonna write a sci fi book. Like it was like the idea was like something he's like, What if aliens at this flying car or whatever. I don't know what it was. Some crazy idiot.

This conversation could go way different. It'd be like Hey, by the way, like I know that you love having these action figures in the plastic still, but can we make a little bit of room for the baby? Oh, you're gonna write a book? I'm gonna go find another husband. So He puts the book out. He sells less than a thousand dollars of the book. Okay, so First

First try at it, failed. Most people would obviously quit. Strike one. He's like, Oh, I'm just getting warmed up. He's like I that was that was good, but I can do better. And he still has no job. He needs to kind of start, you know, paying for the bills a little bit. So I I love this part about the story.

He gets a job, but he's like he's trying to find not the highest paying job. He's trying to p find a job that will make a minimum amount of money that he needs to live with the maximum amount of free hours. So he ends up finding this job that he could do for about twenty five, thirty hours a week. It pays only 10 bucks an hour. But he's like I'll take it.

'Cause there's a lot of downtime where I'm just sitting there, not doing anything. I could be writing during that time. And it's only thirty hours a week, so I can spend all of my free time doing this. And I also don't even want a good job. that'll make it hard to quit later because I want to be an author. And I'm not gonna trap myself in a job. That's like

Hard to leave. Then he changes his schedule. He's like, I'm gonna wake up two AM every day. I'm a right before my job. I'm gonna write during my lunch break and I'm gonna write after dinner. It became a compulsion for him. And in three weeks, he writes this book, Wool. Three weeks. So again, just like James Patterson wasn't precious about

The whole idea of writing books. This guy was like three weeks, not three years. And so he bangs. He bangs out this book, he puts it on Amazon for 99 cents, and he sells like a thousand copies. He's like, boom, thousand bucks. All right, love it. And he's like uh and the but like you know his small reader base, it's kinda like YC, they say you want like a small number of people, you'd rather have a thousand people that love you than a hundred thousand people that just kinda like you.

So he had a thousand people that really love the book and they were like dude, we gotta write a sequel. So Very next month before they get cold. He writes a sequel. By the way, Wall Walls five hundred and thirty pages. He did that in three weeks.

So then he uh He writes a sequel a month later. He uh or like you know two months later, whatever it is, and he sells three thousand copies of that one. He's like, all right, I got to keep going. So he writes two more and he sells 10,000 copies. And finally he puts out the the collection, all five of the books that he's written in a very short period of time. And the first month he sells twenty three thousand copies of the set.

And now he's selling it for six dollars instead of ninety nine cents. It makes basically a hundred forty grand that um in in gross revenue that month. And he's self publishing this whole thing, so he's keeping seventy percent of it. Um whereas a normal author is gonna keep Ten percent, maybe fifteen percent of it. And

All of a sudden Um you know the months roll by. He's now sold five hundred thousand books. Yeah, before uh you know uh before anybody knows it, which is A shit ton of books to sell. That's like you know, you're in the top

Top you know, percent of a percent. uh that are are of of authors at that stage. And he's getting approached by publishers and they're like he's like, Okay, what's the deal? And they're like We'll give you You know, two hundred fifty thousand dollars. Like, I'm already making two hundred fifty thousand dollars. They're like, Okay, we'll give you more money. He's like, Well I'm What why would I give you a

Why would I take some money today for like Now I give up all my upside. And they're like, Well We can help you get distribution. He's like I've sold five hundred thousand copies myself. And they're like, How the hell did you do that? And he's like, and so his strategy, his like guerrilla tactics to get his book out there were

He's like All right, I need to influence the influencers. So he sent basically like Copies of the book to bloggers and reviewers at Goodreads. So not like influencers, but book influencers. So people who review books and Goodreads, like high ranking good Goodreads people. So then he's like, All right, that's good.

Next step. He goes on Reddit and he's got um he does an AMA on Reddit for twelve hours. And so he's just like I'm just gonna like soak up all the Reddit love for this day on on Reddit. All right, does that. Then He starts encouraging fan fiction and fan art, whereas most authors are pretty again precious about like it's my IP.

They try to like, you know, take down anybody who writes like variations of their book. He's like, No, no, no, go crazy. I built the universe, but you guys can fill up it all the stories. And he would basically incentivize people to design other alternative book covers for it. So now their little audience would you know their art that artist audience would see them designing a book cover. For this book called Wool. That was pretty cool. He picks 30 of the diehard readers and he's like, Okay, how do I get my diehards? to help me and become like you know super evangelists. And so he made them beta readers. Again Everybody's so precious. They keep everything under lock and key. He took his super fans and was like, You're gonna be readers of the of the early editions of new books before they come out.

So we did a bunch of community building essentially, like Stuff that doesn't really scale. that each one individually wasn't a game changer, but if you add up that and the twenty other things that he did, you could see how he like That's not what made it successful, but He did start turning the crank. At the beginning the crank is pretty hard to turn, but eventually

You know, you you you if you if you power through that first part of the crank, it'll start to move on its own. And that's basically what happened for this guy. And so then Someone comes up to him and they're like, Look. I don't think you should sell Your book rights. But I do think you should sell your film rights. You haven't actually you're not gonna make a film yourself. So he sold his film rights and um

And he kept his his uh book rights, you know, as an independent I I think maybe he sold it now, I'm not sure. But he uh he also met George R Martin once. He went to a book signing for George uh for George R Martin and he's like Hey, George, like um It's me. You know, Hugh Howie. And the guy's like

Never heard of you. And he's like, I'm the number six guy on the sci-fi list. Like, you know, it's your five books. And I'm number six in George R. Martin, that he posted this thing that George R. Martin signed his book and said To number six. Keep trying. And then a couple of months later a couple months later he actually hit number one. And so uh just a pretty cool story of like a self published author that that really made it happen. Not like an entrepreneurial hustle story.

That's a great story. Do you use Goodreads? Do you know anything about Goodreads? I've used Goodreads. Yeah. I met the founders of Goodreads. Uh and I was like Otis Chandler. Yeah. They're they're really cool people, really nice people. It's a cool product, but But it's old now. been around for a long time. But it's got a great mo. I I g I can tell you a little bit about Goodreads, but this guy, Hugh Hawley, he has

So I'm I use Goodreads religiously. I'm I'm I'm I'm That's kinda like my it's where my library I keep everything. This guy has Seven hundred and fifty thousand ratings, which is huge. And if you're in the hundreds of thousands of ratings. And you have over a four star review, you're like the best of the best. He has a four point one five review.

Uh out of five, four. Almost a million reviews. It's amazing. Yeah, and it all started with a standalone short story, basically. It wasn't even like a full book. It was like a short story that he published at the at the beginning of that first three weeks. But again, that's kind of what you want. It's a prototype, right? He treated it like an entrepreneur would, not like a author would. He's like the blue collar version of Sci Fi. This guy's like the Larry Bird of Sci Fi. You know what I mean? French Lick Indiana. Yeah. Dude, how insane is it that Larry Bird was so amazing and would l just literally drink beers like

On the bus to the game and like s people used to smoke cigarettes at half time. Of those games. Like, isn't that absolutely insane now? Like now LeBron James sleeps in like a hyperbaric chamber. But like The guy who was basically the LeBron James of his time was literally just like downing Bud Lig after games. And he was like so skinny and so pale, had the worst haircut, the shortest shorts, the best mustache. The best mustache, but he like kinda looked like a Like a human version of like Big Bird.

And he just killed it. And he's considered one of the top five. Yeah. That guy's amazing. He he gives uh he gives the weirdos hope. Uh this story's amazing. Hugh Holly Um That's a good story. Um, do you wanna do one or two more thing?

Yeah. Uh Michelle. He's Shepherd. It's great. You need to hire somebody?

Go check it out. It's how I hire a bunch of people. If you want to hire people like I do. You Shepard. How's that? There was no thrill in that show. But I kept it short. Do you have one more thing? Oh, well, I guess we didn't talk about this. Uh this is kinda cool. James Clear just launched an app yesterday, which I think was the

Stimulus for this whole thing that we didn't we didn't talk about? Andrew Wilkinson, uh partnered. He he Andrew Wilson, our friend Andrew Wilkinson, he put out this tweet where he said, uh we partner with James Clear. Tiny owns 40%, James owns sixty percent. We made this. app. I actually didn't look at the app. It's a productivity app or habit tracking app. Yeah.

What if it's just something completely different? It's just a social media app. Photo sharing app. Stupid game. It's like you like they recreated like Snake from Nokia. By the way, okay, so let's talk about a couple things here. Great idea to release a habits app. Uh you want an app to be habit forming. Literally, that's like well, only successful apps are ones that you use habitually. So creating a habits app is a good idea. There's lots of there's habits apps, but they're not made by James Clear. So I think this is like

No. No brainer idea. He just created anything that was a habit, like just like some supplement or drug, like I'm gonna get you addicted. We're gonna make this habit. Watch this. We're gonna call it crack. So I think genius idea by him. Maybe doubly genius idea by Andrew to Pull this off. I think it's amazing what he's doing. He's done this now with Huberman. So he launched uh

The Yurba Mate drink with Yerbain, which I think is Also a genius idea. I think what Andrew's doing now is the new playbook of what Chernan did. Remember I was saying like Chernan's playbook with the content to commerce. They did it with Barstool. They did it with Eater. They did it with like A bunch of these media pro media publications. That was a really good m model and it it's played out over the last ten years.

I think what Andrew's doing now is gonna play out over the next 10 years, which is he's partnering with these experts and authorities. And he's like, look, I already have Meta Lab that can do the design, the engineering. Mm-hmm. I have I I own a portfolio of businesses. I've, you know, made a billion dollars doing this whole thing. So let me Find a CEO, we'll build the whole thing.

You just have to promote it and it's a perfect fit with what you do. I think it's just like such a good model. It's also really fun for him, right?'Cause he's gonna get to Hang out and rub shoulders of people who he likes and respects. He's got like a cool cocktail story of being like, Oh yeah, why we built the James Clear app, we did the Huberman drink, we did the whatever, right? Um, they've done a bunch of these these apps now.

So I just think it's an awesome win all around. Like I'm I'm really happy for her. We should have Andrew on to talk about it, but my prediction is that this won't make nearly as much money as some of his other boring things that no one would ever talk about. But It's cooler than all of the other ones.

Yeah like it's significantly cooler. It won't make as much money, but it's way cooler. Like to be able to like I think this thing's gonna make a lot of money. Why do you think this is not gonna make money? Well, I just think that it's his other stuff just does so much better, if I had to guess. I think the people can do like hundreds of millions on meditation, I'm pretty sure that you can get like thirty, forty million of AR on a habit app. I think maybe you can, but Andrew also owns all these boring agencies that are like

the thousandth most popular agency and they also make ten many, many tens of millions a year in profit. No, no. If you add them all up, they do, but each individually does not, right? Like if you add them all up, they do. Yeah, but his agency. If you add up what he's gonna do with Huberman with James Clear and the next five that he's gonna do like this. Those are gonna add up to be much bigger. The Huberman drink It is a brilliant idea.

That is a absolutely brilliant idea. The James Clare app, like he's getting the right type of things like you don't want necessarily The A list celebrity. The A list celebrity for every you know George Clooney or Ryan Reynolds that you get that that have a hit.

There's tons of others that they don't really care about promoting it. They're too busy, but it's not a fit. They don't have like a direct relationship with their audience'cause they're actually on h in Hollywood. They're not like have a direct channel through social media. And so The people that he's f finding are like

This is meaningful for them. It's a perfect fit with them. They have a direct relationship with their audience and they haven't like Um They have like love from their audience. It's not just like people who are fans of them. It's people who have deep trust in them. And I think that that is a I think he's picking the right influence to do these truths. I I would bet Then he's gonna make hundreds of millions off of these

plays. If you if you add up the, you know, three to five that he's gonna do in this category, I would bet that that's a three to five Three uh like a three hundred million dollar prize. I guess we'll have to have him on and uh ask him about it. I'm He He's like a spider, man. He's or like an octopus. He's has his tentacles like all over the place. I see this. I'm like, How the fuck did you weasel your way into that thing? Like he just like

He knows everything. Like not knows everything. He knows everyone. I don't know how he gets his fingers on all these things. I'd be like Check her. Like, hey, uh where's our email? We're influencers, Andrew. Where you at? Well where's our offer? He also plays dumb with me all the time. I go, like you're I I'm I'd probably be like, Hey, have you heard of this guy named Huberman? I've been loving his podcast and Wilkinson will be like

Yeah, I think it's a nice podcast. I also enjoy it. And then like weeks later, but like Yeah, we partnered with him and launched this company. Yeah. I'm like, Okay, cool. Like he does that. He does that kind of on a regular basis with me where I'll be like if you heard this thing, it's kinda neat. And I'll be like, Yeah, I agree. That is neat. He he is a super networker. He is a absolutely pot like

Incredible networker. I am I I I am I admire. His networking skills. Like he's like Cool, I like Bill Ackman. Now I'm friends with Bill Ackman and he's an investor in my company.

Oh, Charlie Munger's my hero. Years later, I'm having dinner with Charlie Munger and he's offering me, you know, XYZ. It's like he is really able to when he puts his mind to it with who he wants to meet. He is able to make that shit happen. And um And I think he does it in a way that's mutually beneficial. It's not like uh Yeah, most people when they're like, Oh, I want to meet this person, it's like

Just begging t you know, time or attention in a way that's not additive to the other person. I think he does it in a good way that's additive to the other person. Yeah, he's he's fascinating in the way that he's able to but he also He also turns

a weird networking opportunity into like real businesses. Like usually a lot more often than not when I meet people, I'm like that was nice to meet you. I'll see you never again. Uh And that's like where my brain stops. Yeah. What a guy. Yeah. You know, dumb and dumber when he's walking out of the seven eleven. He's like, big gulps, huh? All right. Catch you later. That's me at every networking event. Same. That's exactly how I am. Where it it starts and ends right there. And it's just like a passing memory. And yes, Andrew somehow like makes it into money and turns it into dollars. I don't know how he does it, but he's very good at it. Well, he he told one story on the pod where he was like, I wanted to meet Dan Gilbert, I met Dan Gilbert, and then they had this challenge with this like or he had a product

I have a design agency, so we just made them a website for free. That was really nice. 'Cause I he'll use that as his currency to like You know. Hey, I think you're awesome. And we did this thing.

This is awesome, right? Oh, it's because my agency's awesome. Because I'm awesome. And he just uses it to sort of like open the door. He'll put in the work, basically. And he's he'd be like, Oh Whenever you're free, I'll fly there and let's you know, I'll I'll beat you. You know, I'll make the effort to come make to come make this happen. The takeaway is to have an agency. To either have like an agency or like a sick house. It's like, oh, you're in town, come stay in my home. And then you know what I mean? Like you have to have like some like awesome ex extra. Every time someone's traffic, like, oh, do you want to stay in my house? And I just rent an Airbnb. They're just absolutely indebted to me.

Well, it's kind of a good tactic. Chris Saka said that he had this house and trucky and uh you know he would like lure which sounds weird, more weird than it actually is. Right. He would lure these like interesting founders. Come to my bed. I got AWS credits. Come over. And he would like get these guys to come up and to become friends with them and there was like they're they're like, Well, I would love to hang out in Truckie and just so happens to have a house and that's how we become friends with them. But maybe having an age line about Uh when I lived in San Francisco, I was just constantly getting like meeting requests or event invitations, and it was like a good problem to have, but it it's still a problem. He's like I was playing defense, I was just reacting to whatever was going on. He's like when I moved to Truckee, then I played offense.

I would figure out who is who it is that I want to actually spend time with. And then I would proactively plan and like set it up so that Travis Kallanick came. for the weekend and stayed with him. He's like We're not gonna just

Get coffee. We're gonna hang out for a weekend. And like For every fifty coffee meetings I do, like One weekend is just so much more powerful than fifty coffee meetings. And so he's like

We hang out. We spend time together, they meet my family, we chill in the hot tub, we brainstorm in the morning, then later that evening we a new idea comes And I'm just very hopeful for these people. That's how he did his Uber investment. He did the same thing with the founder of Instagram. That's how he did his Instagram investment too, was he invited Kevin Sistram to come stay at his place in Truckee.

And he stayed there for whatever, a few days, a week or whatever it was. And by the end of that, like they were kinda bonded. And I j I think that was Chris Saka did a lot of cool things, and that's definitely one of them. I don't know if uh A three bedroom.

Place And the burbs is gonna do the trick. I think both of us are gonna have to step it up. Can I interest you in Walnut Creek? Yeah. Marble countertops. I got I got marble countertops. Um Alright, is that it? Is that the pod? That's the pod.

I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I put my law in it like my day's off On the roadless travel never looking back

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